|
Comment #11
Adrian,
Just one comment regarding your excellent BIOS
optimization guide:
You recommend to turn off the "boot up floppy seek" for faster booting. In my
experience this could lead to problems if you are trying to read floppy disks which were
written by a different drive. Each drive's track location varies a bit, and I have seen
that when I enable the boot up floppy seek, "foreign" diskettes, could be read,
while having read errors without this setting. Maybe it does some
"recalibration" of the drive, I dunno. At least it'll help sometimes with read
errors.
Regards,
Udo Thiel
Hello Udo,
You could be right. I wouldn't know because I have never faced such a problem yet. But
thanks for commenting on it. It definitely deserves some attention.
There are two methods on how we can overcome this problem. One is to enable Boot
Up Floppy Seek in the BIOS. The other method is to go to the Floppy Disk tab of
the File System Properties (under System Properties) and enable Check for new
floppy disk drives each time your computer starts. I'm not sure which is the
faster method though...
Adrian Wong
Adrian's Rojak Pot
http://www.rojakpot.com/
http://www.adriansrojakpot.com/
Comment #12
Once again Adrian, another excellent and informative article. I just picked up an ABIT
BE6 for my second machine. As you know it has the built-in ATA66 support, and as such adds
another menu selection for the boot-up sequence. It now adds an "EXT" which
stands for external. Below this setting in the BIOS you then select either SCSI or ATA66
to represent what the external setting equals.
Philip Brown
Yup! That's correct, Philip.
I'll be adding those new BIOS settings to the guide soon. Thanks for reminding me! :-)
Adrian Wong
Adrian's Rojak Pot
http://www.rojakpot.com/
http://www.adriansrojakpot.com/
Comment #13
Hey, just wanted to says thanks for the guide. It's wonderful and very helpful. Keep up
the great work.
Adam
Thanks, Adam! ;)
Adrian Wong
Adrian's Rojak Pot
http://www.rojakpot.com/
http://www.adriansrojakpot.com/
Comment #14
Great article, I always love finding something else to tweak in my system.
One question I have is regarding something you said earlier about "enabling both
Passive Release and Delayed Transaction for optimal performance and to meet PCI 2.1
specs."
As I understand it Passive Release is used to enable or disable the "latency of
the ISA bus master". I only have PCI cards in my system so I have disabled this
option with the understanding that I am not using the ISA bus therefore disable it to
improve performance.
As for Delayed Transaction it is "enabled to meet the latency of PCI cycles to or
from the ISA bus", and to help with IRQ sharing between cards (i.e. PCI 2.1 specs).
As with Passive Release I only have PCI cards in my system and there is no IRQ sharing so
I disabled this setting thinking that I was improving performance.
Am I just blowing smoke or is there a method to my madness?
Markham K. Thomas
Hello Markham,
Both the Passive Release and Delayed Transaction options are in the second page (yet to
be released) of the Chipset Features guide. I'll be posting it as soon as I finish these
e-mails and touch up the guide a little. In any case, I'll try to answer your question.
Both Passive Release and Delayed Transaction are related to the ISA bus. Enabling both
of them will improve performance if you have ISA cards. But if you don't have any ISA
card, disabling them won't improve performance because those options
don't only affect the ISA bus. So, it's best to enable both options.
Adrian Wong
Adrian's Rojak Pot
http://www.rojakpot.com/
http://www.adriansrojakpot.com/
Comment #15
Hi, your BIOS optimization guide is a pretty good and thorough guide, and you do have,
I think one of the only guides of its kind out there. It even includes the settings that
will stall the system if it's overclocked, which is important information for any power
user.
I have to say it even caught me out, especially since I've been caching system and
video RAM since my first 286 et.al. I guess it's a legacy of DOS that no-one remembers why
it's installed or enabled anymore. I will be putting the settings back to what they should
be, and flashing the BIOS with an update tomorrow, so this was a well timed visit.
Thanks for this guide, and I hope others are impressed by your work.
Michael Guy
Yup! Most graphics cards these days require an IRQ for proper operation. Thanks for the
additional information there! :)
Adrian Wong
Adrian's Rojak Pot
http://www.rojakpot.com/
http://www.adriansrojakpot.com/
Comment #16
Hi,
You treat both of these items as separate things, but I can only find HDD block mode in
my BIOS (Award). Where is the 32 bit I/O modes that you talk about? I run NT, and I want
to ensure that I disable both of these. Thanks and good job on your site.
Chuck Kays
Hello there, Chuck,
Your BIOS won't have all the settings. In your case, the HDD Block Mode probably
controls the 32-bit I/O mode as well. But hang in there first, Chuck. I have just been
informed by several visitors that WinNT does NOT require you to disable
either or both settings. I'll try to confirm it as soon as I can.
Adrian Wong
Adrian's Rojak Pot
http://www.rojakpot.com/
http://www.adriansrojakpot.com/
Comment #17
Like the gentleman in Comment
#9, I was delighted to find your guide. Also like the
same commenter, I would like a printed copy. I tried both the Ctrl-P and Print button on
my Netscape Navigator 4.61 menus. Pages print out, but the white on black prints purely
white on the two different laser printers I tried, so the results are not informative. If
you have a special printer setup to print your BIOS guides, could you share the details?
Thanks, and regards,
Jay Aiken
Oh... yeah... I can see how that would be a problem... ;(
I will have to give some thought to this problem... But in the meantime, I think the
easiest way would be to open up a word processor, select the text in the BIOS guide that
you want, copy and paste that section into the word processor document and print it out.
Quite troublesome but it should work out quite nicely.
Adrian Wong
Adrian's Rojak Pot
http://www.rojakpot.com/
http://www.adriansrojakpot.com/
Comment #18
I think you are wrong in stating that enabling Video BIOS Cacheable or System BIOS
Cacheable causes the BIOS to be cached in the CPU's L2. Instead, I believe this causes the
BIOS (whichever) to be copied to RAM. The ROM chips on your video board or motherboard are
very slow compared to RAM, and if you have 64M or RAM, I doubt you'd miss the 256K that it
take to copy the ROMs.
I may be wrong, but what would "Video BIOS Cacheable" mean on a system with
no L2 cache like the original Celeron?
John Petzinger
Hello John,
You must have confused Video/System BIOS Cacheable with Video/System Shadowing.
Shadowing is a method of improving BIOS access time by copying it out from the ROM to the
system RAM. Video/System BIOS Cacheable works by using the L2 cache to cache the Video and
System BIOSes. If you check your motherboard manual, it should state the same thing.
If you are using the original cacheless Celeron, the option would simply have no
meaning at all because there's no L2 cache to cache the BIOS.
Adrian Wong
Adrian's Rojak Pot
http://www.rojakpot.com/
http://www.adriansrojakpot.com/
Comment #19
Hi,
Great idea to have a guide to the arcane and mysterious world of the BIOS. I've had an
AMD K6 3-450 (with 128MB PC100 RAM, 13GB Maxtor, 16MB STB Velocity TNT Graphics on a
Chaintec 5AGM) which I just couldn't push beyond a Winstone of 24.9 !!
Thanks to your guide I'm actually getting 25.1 now. Cool :)
Cheers
Clinton
Hello Clinton,
Just glad to be of some help to you! :)
Adrian Wong
Adrian's Rojak Pot
http://www.rojakpot.com/
http://www.adriansrojakpot.com/
Comment #20
One question I have that was not addressed by your guide (or by any of the other
comments/responses) is that of the "Spread Spectrum Modulated" setting. Does
this yield added performance in its on or off states, or other advantages? Also, is it
best to leave block mode enabled or disabled with Windows 9x?
Thanks in advance for any advice.
Greg
Hello Greg,
Spread Spectrum Modulated will be discussed in the upcoming page 2 of the Chipset
Features guide. Just hang in there for a while.
As I have stated in the guide, it's definitely better to enable the IDE Block Mode
option for better IDE performance.
Hope that helps you some! :)
Adrian Wong
Adrian's Rojak Pot
http://www.rojakpot.com/
http://www.adriansrojakpot.com/ |
